The big budget adult feature may be on the wane, but AVN Award-winning director James Avalon is striving to keep the sort of top-notch production values associated with such shows alive.
In order to do so, he will be shooting a new line of what he calls “mini-features” — 35- to 45-minute, self-contained productions — under his own banner, Intimate Media, to be released through new company Wanted Pictures.
“We’re going for another market niche,” Avalon told AVN.com, “[trying] to get into the mind of female eroticism. It’s still hardcore, but more [for] … guys that want to show hardcore porn to their girlfriends.”
Each mini-feature will be sold individually, and will retail for around $12.99 on DVD, Avalon said. With this strategy, not only will he be able to shoot with higher production values than standard, five-scene wall-to-wall fare, but the end product will have a unique appeal for couples, he predicts.
“It’s just, if you go into a store, you don’t want to plop down forty bucks for something that you're gonna watch a few minutes of and then have sex with your girlfriend, and it’s over,” he explained. “I think that [women] are more interested in hardcore than the popular belief is. They're just not interested in the same sort of things that regular guys like — the real hard, hard stuff. It needs a little more romance to it.”
This new approach, Avalon posits, should allow him to maintain his creative standards in a market that he feels is moving away from big, high-cost productions. “The market seems to be really leery of the bigger budget stuff,” he said, “and I can shoot the lower budget stuff, but you have to do things differently.”
